The success of in-vitro fertilization (IVF) may rely on careful monitoring and stimulation of the ovulation process. A patient's ovaries may be regularly scanned with transvaginal ultrasound (also known as endovaginal or EV ultrasound) to monitor the growth of ovarian follicles. A steady increase in the number and/or diameter of the follicles may indicate that the patient is responding well to treatment. Once an adequate number of follicles are present and the follicles reach a predetermined size, eggs may be aspirated, fertilized and re-implanted (or may be frozen).
Manual counting and measurement of follicles may be tedious and/or may be prone to human error.
Segmentation may represent the process of identifying pixels or voxels representing a given structure in an image or set of image data, which may include separating the pixels or voxels from the rest of the image or set of image data.
Ultrasound images may be noisy, for example due to speckle. Ultrasound images may also be prone to artifacts, for example acoustic shadows. Reverberation artifacts may artificially raise the intensity of an object. Furthermore, the intensity level of an ultrasound image may be arbitrary and may vary across an image. The variation in intensity level of the ultrasound image can make segmentation in ultrasound particularly challenging.